For nearly forty years, Santa Monica has largely resisted one thing that much of Los Angeles eventually embraced: billboards.
That wasn’t an accident.
The Third Street Promenade became successful because it felt different. It wasn’t Sunset Boulevard. It wasn’t Times Square. It was a place where people came to walk, eat dinner, watch street performers, and enjoy being outside without being overwhelmed by advertising.
The City has now approved large digital displays along portions of the Promenade as part of its effort to revitalize downtown, and the first proposals — including one for a landmarked building — are arriving. The reasoning is understandable: vacancies remain a challenge, city finances are tight, and officials are looking for ways to generate revenue and draw visitors back downtown. Filling storefronts, shoring up the budget, and bringing people back are worthwhile goals.
But before these screens go up, it’s worth asking a simple question: what problem is actually being solved?
Will larger advertisements encourage new businesses to open? Will brighter screens create a stronger sense of place? Or is this proposal putting at risk the very character that has made the Promenade successful for more than thirty years?
As architects, we spend our careers thinking about how people experience cities. The places people remember aren’t defined by their advertisements. They’re defined by buildings, landscaping, public spaces, and the way people interact with them. Great architecture quietly frames life. Great public spaces encourage people to look at each other, not at a screen.
Digital billboards reverse that relationship. They become the architecture, while everything else becomes the backdrop.
To be fair, some cities have embraced large digital displays successfully. Supporters believe they create energy, modernize aging districts, and provide revenue that can be reinvested in the community. Given the challenges facing downtown Santa Monica, it’s easy to see why city leaders are exploring the idea.
But there are consequences that deserve equal attention.
Los Angeles recently received an unexpected case study with the Tesla Diner in Hollywood. Long before opinions formed about the restaurant itself, nearby residents began voicing concerns about the enormous LED displays, increased nighttime brightness, traffic, and the impact on their quality of life. Whether every complaint proves justified is almost beside the point. The lesson is that digital displays don’t stop at the property line. Light travels. Noise travels. Their impacts extend well beyond the business that benefits from them.
A Process Worth Examining
The Promenade proposal deserves that same scrutiny, and how the City arrived here matters. Authority over these signs was steered away from the Landmarks Commission early on. The Digital Display District Ordinance adopted in December, 2025. The City Manager is to certify, after non-binding consultation with the Landmarks Commission at a duly noticed public hearing, whether a display on a landmarked building is reversible, whether it materially impairs the landmark’s significance, and whether the features behind the screen stay physically intact, after considering, but not being bound by, the Landmarks Commission’s input.
That process is now playing out at 1355 Third Street Promenade, where a 1,000-square-foot, full-motion LED display has been proposed for two facades of a landmarked building. The Commission has yet to receive a formal staff presentation, though the sign company’s attorney recently invited commissioners to an informal viewing ahead of the Commission’s July 13th public hearing.
All of this is legal. The ordinance deliberately carves digital displays out of Chapter 9.56 of the City’s Landmarks Ordinance — exempting them from certificate of appropriateness review, which is otherwise required for changes to landmarked buildings. Each sign operator will pay the City $500,000 up front, plus the greater of 20% of gross revenue or a $500,000 annual guarantee, with citywide projections of $3.5 to $7 million a year. Those figures explain the City’s interest, and they also mean the same official judging whether a landmark is impaired is evaluating a revenue stream the City depends on. That’s not a conflict of interest in the legal sense; it’s a structural one, in which the decider has a fiscal stake in the outcome.
More troubling, the three criteria themselves never ask the question that actually matters. Preservation law, following the National Register framework that Santa Monica’s own criteria are modeled on, protects seven aspects of a landmark’s integrity: location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association. The ordinance checks only whether an installation is removable and whether the material fabric survives, borrowing the “reversibility” language of preservation standards while dropping the companion requirement that new work be visually compatible with the landmark. A screen can leave every brick untouched while erasing a building’s design, setting, and feeling for decades. And “reversible” means little over a thirty-year term; for anyone alive today, it’s permanent. A landmark is experienced through its facade. One that can’t be seen isn’t preserved. It’s warehoused behind an advertisement.
None of this required anyone to break a rule. But a review that protects only what nobody can see, while monetizing what everyone does, isn’t really asking the question preservation is supposed to answer.
What’s Really Being Decided
The larger concern extends beyond any single building or approval.
It’s what these displays represent.
Advertising has become nearly impossible to escape. It’s on phones, social media feeds, streaming services, and podcasts. Ironically, many people now pay extra simply to experience fewer advertisements, because uninterrupted attention has become something worth paying for.
Which raises the question of why Santa Monica would choose to introduce more advertising into one of its most cherished public spaces.
This isn’t an argument against business or economic development. The Promenade has always been a commercial district, and that’s part of its success. Restaurants, retailers, hotels, and entertainment all belong there. Commerce creates vibrant cities.
Advertising is different.
There is an important distinction between creating places where businesses thrive and creating places where advertising dominates the experience. One supports the city. The other competes with it.
Cities are shaped by thousands of small decisions. One more sign. One more screen. One more opportunity to generate revenue. Individually, each decision seems reasonable. Collectively, they determine whether a city feels timeless or temporary.
Santa Monica should absolutely invest in the Promenade, but that investment should focus on what made it successful in the first place: exceptional public spaces, thoughtful architecture, local businesses, cultural events, landscaping, safety, and experiences that bring people together. Those are the things that create lasting destinations.
Digital billboards don’t create those experiences. They simply monetize the people who are already there.
Perhaps these displays will generate meaningful revenue. Perhaps they will help fund improvements that benefit everyone. If that’s the case, the City should present clear projections, measurable goals, and an honest public discussion of the tradeoffs, including a hard look at whether the review process is actually evaluating the thing it claims to protect. A five-year sunset review with genuine removal authority, and annual public reporting of actual revenue against those projections, would be a fair place to start.
Because this decision isn’t really about advertising. It’s about identity.
Every city eventually decides what is worth protecting. Santa Monica’s greatest asset has never been its advertising. It’s been the experience of walking down the Promenade.
Matt Hoefler, Architect NCARB for SMa.r.t., Santa Monica Architects for a Responsible Tomorrow.
Dan Jansenson, Architect (former Building & Fire-Life Safety Commissioner); Robert H. Taylor, Architect AIA; Mario Fonda-Bonardi, Architect AIA (former Planning Commissioner); Sam Tolkin, Architect (former Planning Commissioner); Michael Jolly ARE-CRE; Jack Hillbrand AIA, Landmarks Commission Architect; Phil Brock (SM Mayor, ret.); Matt Hoefler, Architect NCARB; Heather Thomason, community organizer; Charles Andrews, columnist. journalist; Bruce Leddy, Human Services Commissioner and NOMA Co-Chair.
